Another dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives turns up a very under-rated Iraq war film featuring strong supporting turns from Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The Iraq War has become a continuing nightmare for the United States military to set beside Vietnam. Surprisingly it’s also become impossible terrain for American film-makers compared to the cinematic response to Vietnam. It falls to writer/director Kimberly Pierce to make the finest film about the Iraq War to date. This is her first feature since 1999’s acclaimed Boys Don’t Cry and Pierce has waited a long time to provide another absorbing and heartbreaking slice of small town Americana. The film opens with an action set-piece in Iraq that conveys tedium, paranoia, fear, bloodlust and chaos more effectively than the entirety of Brian De Palma’s Redacted. The real focus of this film is the psychological battle on the home-front back in Texas.

There is no place for a warrior in a stable society. This is a melancholy truth that has found expression over and over again in fiction, if you set out to protect your home your violent deeds will unfit you for ever living there again. “I’m going to miss blowing shit up” laments Channing Tatum’s Steve Shriver as he hands over his weapons for discharge from the army having served his required tours of duty. What exactly are these men going to do back in their small town? Jobs are scarce, they’re adrenaline junkies and scarred by the savagery they’ve witnessed and been forced to commit in Iraq. The dilemma is best exemplified by the out of control Pt. Tommy Burgess. Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a supporting role as the violent alcoholic Tommy is as superb as his performances in Brick, The Look-Out and Mysterious Skin have led us to expect. Burgess and Shriver desperately need their commanding officer Brandon King to keep them in check. King is leaving the military…until he finds the President has signed an order keeping him in the army against his will.

Ryan Phillipe is impressively mature as the righteously indignant Staff Sergeant Brandon King who thinks he should not be asked to pointlessly lead more men to their deaths. Australian actress Abbie Cornish is a fine foil as Michelle, Shriver’s neglected girlfriend who offers to drive King to Washington. There are echoes of Phillipe’s previous role in Flags of OurFathers. King is convinced that he can just take the matter up with his local Senator who welcomed him home but he quickly learns the harsh truth. You’re a hero when you’re fighting, but when the war finishes or you’ve gone AWOL from a Stop-Loss, they don’t want to hear about you anymore. The shadow of Vietnam hangs heavy over this film as King suddenly realises his choices are return to Iraq or flee to Canada, start a new life there and never be able to return home again. This is never preachy, always compelling and emotionally taut. An absolute must see.

Mud writer/director Jeff Nichols makes his studio debut on April 15th with this tale he places roughly in the territory of John Carpenter’s Starman and De Palma’s The Fury. Nichols regular Michael Shannon plays a father forced to go on the run with his son after discovering the kid has special powers, and the FBI is interested in them… Sam Shepard also recurs, as does cinematographer Adam Stone, while Adam Driver, Kirsten Dunst, and Joel Edgerton join the Nichols stable. It’s hard to imagine a genre tale from Nichols, but perhaps an unusually heart-felt Stephen King captures it.

Everybody Wants Some

April 15th sees Richard Linklater release a ‘spiritual sequel’ to both Dazed and Confused and Boyhood. Little is known for sure about Everybody Wants Some, other than it’s a comedy-drama about college baseball players during the 1980s, that follows a boy entering college, meeting a girl, and a new band of male friends. The cast features Blake Jenner, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, and Zoey Deutch, so in retrospect may be as star-studded as his 1993 exploration of the end of high school. Hopefully it’s as archetypal and poignant as that as regards the college experience.

Love & Friendship

On April 27th almost exactly four years since Damsels in Distress the urbane Whit Stillman returns with another tale of female friendship, with a little help in the scripting department from Jane Austen. His Last Days of Disco stars Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny reunite for this adaptation of Austen’s ‘Lady Susan’ novella shot in Ireland. Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave, and Xavier Samuel are the supporting players as Beckinsale tries to marry off her daughter (Morfydd Clark) but the real attraction is Stillman, poet of dry wit and elite social rituals, adapting an author with similar preoccupations.

The Nice Guys

Shane Black’s third directorial effort, out on May 20th, sees him back on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang territory. Get ready for Ryan Gosling to Bogart his way thru the seedy side of the City of Angels as Holland March, PI. March partners up with a rookie cop (Matt Bomer) to investigate the apparent suicide of a porn star. But standing in his way is an LA Confidential reunion: Kim Basinger as femme fatale, Russell Crowe as Det. Jackson Healy. It’s hard not to be excited at the prospect of terrific dialogue carrying some hysterically self-aware genre deconstruction.

Queen of Earth

We can expect writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s latest movie to hit Irish cinemas sometime in June. Listen Up Philip star Elisabeth Moss takes centre-stage here alongside Inherent Vice’s Katherine Waterston as two old friends who retreat to a lake house only to discover that they have grown very far apart with the passage of time. Keegan DeWitt scores his second movie for ARP not with jazz but a dissonance appropriate to the unusual close-ups, that have invited comparison with Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, as a spiky Waterston hurts an emotionally wounded Moss in all the old familiar places.

Independence Day: Resurgence

Roland Emmerich, the maestro of bombastic action that is actually mocking its audience, returns on June 24th (for some reason) with a belated sequel in which the aliens come back. Jeff Goldblum has led a 20 year scramble to harness alien tech to strengthen earth’s defences but will those efforts (and Liam Hemsworth’s mad piloting skills) be enough against an even more imposing armada? Sela Ward is the POTUS, Bill Pullman’s POTUS has grown a beard, his daughter has morphed from Mae Whitman into Maika Monroe, and the indefatigable Judd Hirsch returns to snark about these changes.

La La Land

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling team up again on July 15th for an original musical from Whiplash writer/director Damien Chazelle. Gosling is a jazz musician in LA who falls in love with Stone’s aspiring actress, and that’s all you need for plot. Stone did an acclaimed turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway, but whether Gosling or JK Simmons (!!) can hold a tune is unknown. The real question is will it be half-embarrassed to be a musical (Chicago), attempt unwise grittiness (New York, New York), or be as mental as aMoulin Rouge! with original songs?

Suicide Squad

And on August 5th we finally get to see what Fury auteur David Ayer has done with Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery. The latest trailer has amped up the nonsense quotient considerably, and this now looks like The Dirty Dozen scripted by Grant Morrison. Joel Kinnaman’s long-suffering Rick Flagg has to lead into combat the assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), angry mercenary Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), witch Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), half-man half-crocodile Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and the psycho in psychotherapy, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). All eyes are on Robbie’s take on Harley, well until Jared Leto’s Mistah J turns up…

Sausage Party

August 12th sees the release of probably the most ridiculous film you will see all year, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have scripted an adult animation about a sausage in a grocery store on a quest to discover the truth of his existence. Apart from Jay Baruchel, all the voices you’d expect are present and correct: James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, David Krumholtz, as well as Kristen Wiig, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek. But given how Green Hornet failed can R-rated semi-improvised comedy and animation go hand in hand?

War on Everyone

The Guard in New Mexico! Okay, maybe not quite, but in that wheelhouse. In late August John Michael McDonagh makes his American bow with a blackly comic thriller about two renegade cops (Alexander Skarsgaard and Michael Pena) who have devoted themselves to blackmailing and framing every criminal who crosses their path. And then they come across that somebody they shouldn’t have messed with… McDonagh’s two previous outings as writer/director have been very distinctive, visually, philosophically, and verbally, but you wonder if he’ll have to endlessly self-censor his take no prisoners comedy for ‘liberal’ American sensibilities. Hopefully not.

The Girl on the Train

Following Gone Girl another book of the moment thriller gets rapidly filmed on October 7th when Emily Blunt becomes the titular voyeur. From her commuter train seat she witnesses the interactions of perfect couple Haley Bennett and Luke Evans as she slows down at a station on the way to London. Then one day she sees something she shouldn’t have, and decides to investigate… The impressive supporting cast includes Rebecca Ferguson, Laura Prepon, Allison Janney, and Justin Theroux, but it’s not clear if Secretary screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson has relocated the action to New York.

The Great Wall

November 23rd sees Chinese director Zhang Yimou embrace Hollywood, with an English-language story about the construction of the Great Wall of China scripted by Max Brooks and Tony Gilroy. Zhang has assembled an impressive international cast including Matt Damon, Andy Lau, Willem Dafoe, Jing Tian, Zhang Hanyu, and Mackenzie Foy for this sci-fi fantasy of the Wall’s completion. Little is known about the actual plot, but Zhang’s recent movies about the Cultural Revolution have been a drastic change of pace from the highly stylised colourful martial arts epics of Imperial China he’s known for in the West.

The Founder

Michael Keaton cements his leading man comeback on November 25th with a blackly comic biopic of Ray Kroc. Who is Ray Kroc you ask? The Founder of … McDonald’s. Yes the McDonald brothers did own a hamburger store, but it wasn’t them that expanded into a national and then global, brand. That was all Kroc, who bought them out, and then forgot to pay them royalties; one of several incidents of what people might call either unethical behaviour or recurrent amnesia. Supporting players include Nick Offerman, Laura Dern, and Patrick Wilson, so this tale might be quite tasty.

Story of Your Life

Denis Villeneuve gears up for directing Blade Runner 2 with an original sci-fi movie that should arrive late in 2016. A first contact story, adapted by Eric Heisserer from Ted Chiang’s short story, it follows Amy Adams’ Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics expert recruited by the U.S. military. Her job is to decipher an alien race’s communications, but her close encounter with ET causes vivid flashbacks to events from her life. Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, and Michael Stuhlbarg are physicists and spooks trying to figure out what her unnerving experiences mean for rest of the humanity.

Passengers

Stomping on Rogue One with a December 21st release date is the dream team of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. Poor Keanu Reeves spent years trying to make this sci-fi rom-com happen but as soon as these two expressed interest Jon Spaihts’ long-circling script got permission to land. Pratt wakes from cryo-sleep 90 years too early, so wakes up another passenger to relieve his loneliness on the somnambulant spaceship. Michael Sheen is a robot, but the potential for delight is offset by worthy director Morten Tyldum and the high probability of the contrivance of every other rom-com being used.

Assassin’s Creed

‘One for the studio, One for ourselves’. As it were. December 21st sees the acclaimed Macbeth trio of Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and director Justin Kurzel reunite for a blockbuster based on the all-conquering game. Ubisoft Motion Pictures (yes, that’s really a thing now) and New Regency have opted not to adapt the story of Desmond Miles, or Ezio Auditore; perhaps in case this bombs. Fassbender plays original character Callum Lynch who can commune with his ancestor Aguilar, also played by Fassbender; presumably with a devilish grin as he battles the Spanish Inquisition. Fingers crossed that this works.

The Behind The Scenes strand at JDIFF 2015 recognises the importance of the Festival to Irish film-makers with a number of masterclasses, public interviews, panel discussions, conferences, and networking events. This year there is a special emphasis on the making of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, as well as events with casting directors Margery Simkin (Top Gun) and Leo Davis (Layer Cake), and actors Robert Sheehan (Love/Hate) and Aidan Turner (Being Human).

Talking Kubrick

Marking the 40th anniversary of Barry Lyndon, which receives a gala screening in the Savoy with both star Ryan O’Neal and producer Jan Harlan being interviewed by Lenny Abrahamson, there are three events related to Kubrick’s period epic.

Scene on the Square

2.00pm, Saturday 14th March, Wolfe Tone Square

A free event in association with LoveMovies.ie sees a fencing duel being filmed live on the Square. In a unique opportunity to see cinematic magic created up close spectators can watch the video footage live-streamed onto a large screen while the MC explains the various roles of the crew members capturing the action sequence.

Kubrick’s Cameras and The Cinematography of Barry Lyndon

10.30am, Saturday 21st March, Light House Cinema

The Irish Society of Cinematographers lends its imprimatur to this unmissable event for both aspiring camera operators and mere enthusiasts of Kubrick’s cinema legacy. Larry Smith, Doug Milsome, Laurie Frost, Joe Dunton, and Luke Quigley; members of the crew from Barry Lyndon one and all; will be discussing the making of the film, the challenge of working with director Stanley Kubrick, and the techniques they used to achieve the unforgettable look of the film, famous for its ultra-low-light candlelit scenes.

Producing with Jan Harlan

11.00am, Sunday 22nd March, Light House Cinema

Jan Harlan was executive producer on Stanley Kubrick’s final four films Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, and assisted on the production of AClockwork Orange, as well as executive producing AI: Artificial Intelligence, and directing Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. He was also Kubrick’s brother-in-law, which must have made for a complicated dynamics. He will share insights about his career, which has veered towards documentary after Kubrick’s death, and his working relationship with the eccentric self-mythologising director.

Talking Shop

A series of industry workshops and events features Robert Sheehan, Aidan Turner and Sarah Greene on acting, Reka Lemhenyi on editing, Tomm Moore on animating, Hossein Amini on writing movies, and Leo Davis and Margery Simkin on casting.

Broadcasting: A Changing Landscape

12.00pm, Friday 20th March, Wood Quay

The first of the Festival’s Screen Test series, in association with BAI, features guests David Levine (General Manager, Disney Channels UK & Ireland) and Brian Furey (BAI). This event will discuss how new and emerging platforms such as Netflix & VOD are affecting the content being produced for TV & radio. The technological developments of these download services will be explored from the point of view of broadcasters and show-runners.

Animators in Conversation

1.30pm, Sunday 22nd March, Light House Cinema

Two-time Oscar nominee writer/director Tomm Moore (The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea), of Cartoon Saloon, and animation producer Didier Brunner (The Secret of Kells) will discuss developments in animation today, in a must-see for anyone interested in a career in one of Ireland’s fastest growing creative sectors, as well as lovers of animation.

The Art of Manipulation: Editing with Reka Lemhenyi

3.00pm, Monday 23rd March, Teachers Club

In the second of the Screen Test series award-winning Hungarian editor Reka Lemhenyi (The Door) discusses editing techniques in depth and her illustrious career, including her work on Jerzy Skolimowksi’s Essential Killing, as well as Free Fall, which is screening as part of this year’s festival.

Expressing Emotion: Actors in Conversation

3.00pm, Tuesday 24th March, Teachers Club

As part of the Screen Test strand, young acting talents Robert Sheehan (The RoadWithin, Love/Hate), Aidan Turner (Being Human, The Hobbit), and Sarah Greene (Noble, My Brothers) discuss their evolving careers, their training as actors, and how they got started in the industry.

Write to Live, Live to Write: Managing your Writing Career

3.00pm, Wednesday 25th March, Teachers Club

In association with the Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square, this event is aimed at screenwriters looking for advice about managing and maintaining their career, and the challenges of the creative process, idea management, and overcoming the dreaded writer’s block. The panel is comprised of script consultant Mary Kate O’Flanagan, story development professional Rachel O’Flanagan, Conor McMahon (From the Dark), and Pierce Ryan (Standby).

Conquering the Script (Day 1)

Friday 27th March, Hugh Lane Gallery

The day will take participants on a journey from the early generation of ideas into the development of story through the paradigm of conflict and the crisis screen characters need to undergo in order to render a film powerful and engaging. There will be a story debate with film-makers about their completed films, the development process, and the story choices they made. Panellists and guests on the day will include director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank, Room), as well as development specialists Juanita Wilson (Octagon Films) and Eoin O’Faolain (Samson Films).

Conquering the Script (Day 2)

Saturday 28th March, Wood Quay Venue

The second day kicks off with a debate on the current state of story-telling in Irish film and television drama. As the day continues another session is devoted to kitting out the development tool box, more story debate with a feature director, and the closing keynote interview with Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini. Panellists on the day will include Michael Kinirons, Will Collins, Eugene O’Brien, Ian Power and Carol Morely.

It Begins with the Script: Casting Event

2.00pm, Saturday 28th March, Teachers Club

2015’s iteration of the popular JDIFF casting events sees Emmy-nominated Leo Davis, who has worked on Layer Cake, The Constant Gardener, The King’s Speech and TheQueen, discuss her work in conversation with Margery Simkin, whose own credits include the blockbusters Avatar, Top Gun and Erin Brockovich.

Talking Ideas

Pulling back from the daily practice of film-making are three events that look at the bigger picture of cultural milieu, how cinema appropriates novels and history for its own purposes and how it then helps shape people’s experiences.

Collins Barracks is the appropriately historic setting for a discussion on the cinematic depiction of history. Film-makers Mary McGuckian (The Price Of Desire), Se Merry Doyle (Talking To My Father), and Jennifer Goff, curator of the Eileen Gray collection at the National Museum of Ireland, will raise questions such as “do film-makers feel a responsibility to represent historical events accurately?” The answers will be interesting to hear following an Oscars dominated by prestige biopics which made a pigswill of history for the sake of deadening screenwriting clichés, while, as Maureen Dowd acidly noted of Selma’s depiction of LBJ, at the same time clutching their ‘historical authenticity’ tightly to their breasts as a talisman to win Oscars. Do film-makers have an ethical responsibility not to rewrite the past?

Seeking the Truth: Mark Cousins in Conversation

12.00pm, Thursday 26th March, Irish Times Building

Northern Irish film-maker, critic, lecturer, sometime Moviedrome presenter, and programmer Mark Cousins (The Story of Film, 6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia) travels south to engage in a public interview about his life and work. Will he mention Brian De Palma’s absolute refusal to assent to Cousins’ reading of his films?

First Rule of Book Club….

2.30pm, Friday 27th March, Pearse Street Library

With the current popularity of adaptations on large and small screen (Gone Girl, Game of Thrones, American Sniper) this discussion focuses on book to film adaptations, and what drives audiences towards one medium or another. Bob Johnston of the Gutter Bookshop and Jason Flood of Dublin City Comics will lead the debate on Hollywood’s hunger for stories. Will the latter cite Alan Moore’s contempt for moving a story designed to work perfectly in one medium into another purely to make more money and not for any creative purpose?

Film composer Ennio Morricone belied his 86 years for a sprightly concert conducting some of his most beloved scores in a sold-out Point last Saturday.

Morricone was conducting the full Czech National Symphony Orchestra, some 86 musicians, backed by the 76 singers of the Kodaly Choir of Debrecen in Hungary. He began with the piano-led title theme from The Untouchables with its unusual wailing brass, before segueing into a suite of rich string-led themes from his last collaboration with director Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in America, and then his lengthy theme for frequent collaborator Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of 1900, which combined lush orchestration with surprising diversions into cabaret and blues to musically recreate the feel of years going by on a cruise ship. Morricone’s fondness for bundling so many themes into one set caused more than a few disruptive moments where the audience determinedly applauded, drowning out the start of the next tune, leading my sometime co-writer John Healy to suspect rhythmic holding patterns in later segues…

Morricone has scored an unreasonable amount of films and TV miniseries, most of them Italian, so he showcased his less familiar work with a selection from the late 60s and early 70s, including H2S and Metti, una sera a cena. Two themes from Love Circle had an unfortunate tendency to lapse into 70s romance pastiche, but Maddalena and The Sicilian Clan were unfamiliar works which stood out; utilising electric guitar and drums gave a rockier feel akin to Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry score, and Sicilian Clan in particular managed to combine romance and menace simultaneously. Morricone’s final pre-interval set showcased his career-defining work with Leone with the slowly building choral and orchestral splendour and jagged guitars of The Good, The Badand the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dynamite, and ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’.

After the interval Morricone unveiled three more sets of themes. Collaborations with directors Tornatore, Brian De Palma, and Gillo Pontecorvo were highlighted in the choice of themes from Cinema Paradiso, Malena, Casualties of War, The Battle ofAlgiers, and Burn! all. While those scores for Tornatore and De Palma are all about tugging at the heart-strings thru lush strings, the edgier music for Pontecorvo is all about percussion – indeed the ironically joyous ‘Abolisson’ from Burn! was performed with no fewer than five percussionists. Morricone also conducted more scores from obscure Italian films, with the jokey percussion instrumentation and mock-suspense melody of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and the distorted keyboard and jaunty melody of La classes operaia va in paradise particularly noteworthy. Morricone’s final set was inevitably The Mission: ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’, ‘Falls’, ‘On Earth as It Is in Heaven’.

The maestro spoke only thru his music, but his three encores; ‘Here’s to You’, ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’, ‘On Earth as It Is in Heaven’; said it all. Morricone is one of that select band of composers whose music has escaped the films they were meant to complement to take on a life of their own. Whether it’s the inimitable whistling of Leone’s Wild West or the quasi-sacramental effect of his famous oboe solo Morricone has transcended the medium.